Why Newbies Shouldn't Wear Implants
Maybe the little show I'd put on after dropping Flesh had been a bit too much for a certain demographic—men, mostly. The instant I stood under the arena spotlights and threw out an open, shameless taunt, enraged challengers came pouring out of the woodwork. I put those so-called heavy hitters down just as easily.
How strong could they really be, these guys who'd only come to watch a fight? It's the same delusion as sitting through a sports match thinking you could do better than the people on the field—except the odds of that actually being true are vanishingly small. The criminals packing this place weren't any different.
Four wins in a row. The pot's just about ready to boil.
Starting with Flesh, I'd turned every idiot who rushed me into a bloody pulp and had them hauled off the floor, and the atmosphere was racing toward a fever pitch. Everyone in here was starting to believe I might actually take Hell's Death Match and walk away with the prize. My skill had something to do with it, sure—but so did the name.
"Super Rookie! Super Rookie! Super Rookie!"
"From this day forward, the Super Rookie and I are of one heart and one body. To insult the Super Rookie is to insult me."
"I'm dumping my entire fortune on the Super Rookie! Aaaaaaah!"
Super Rookie. Compared to a slur like "Flesh," the weight that name carried was in a different league entirely. Honestly, it was a little cringey—every time I heard it, I felt vaguely embarrassed.
But the reputation? That's the real deal.
Look around. I'd just beaten Ted Chan's lab rat and a string of equally vicious criminals, soaking up the cheers and the spotlight. I was standing in a space ringed by nearly a thousand of the worst offenders alive, openly taunting them. And still, not a single one of them was stepping up to break my last winning streak.
I'd have been perfectly happy if the match just ended here. But there was no way the people running an illegal fight club were going to sit back and watch me walk off with the prize for free. Not when that prize was Prototype Liquid Nanobots.
"Out of the way, you chickenshit bastards!"
Right on cue. A man shoved through the prisoner crowd and stepped into view—solid muscle, implant ports studded here and there across his body, the classic skinhead look. What really caught the eye were the ocular implants, flashing red as they tracked me from moment to moment. One glance was enough to know this guy wasn't ordinary.
In the world of EFD, the punks who slap on one or two implants and strut around are what you'd call budget-tier criminals. This one looked high-end at the very least.
"Wasn't planning on slumming it in some brat's little sandbox. But there's more than a couple things I can't just let slide."
The nameless man muttered to himself as he climbed up onto the arena floor, and the staff, as if they'd been waiting for exactly this, rushed in to haul away the fourth sacrificial lamb's limp body. Once again, only two people were left standing in the ring. Same scene, fifth time running.
The crowd, which had been holding its silence, welcomed the grand finale with open arms.
"WHOOOOOA! That's Wolf, second-in-command of the My Way Team!"
"No way! That Wolf?! The Blood-Red Golden Generation of the 40,000s!"
"Wasn't that guy the type who buys a premium ticket, has his fun, and leaves?"
"Who cares? That's Wolf out there!"
"Super Rookie or Wolf—which one's the underdog?"
"You moron, there's no underdog in this one! They're both favorites!"
I clicked my tongue at the prisoners' impromptu trivia hour ringing out from every direction. Maybe it was because these inmates had been cut off from the outside world for so long, but their naming sense felt strangely dated. A little wit wouldn't have killed them. Then again, expecting that from a bunch of criminals might be asking too much.
"Judging by the hardware you've slathered on, you must be doing all right for yourself. Or were you another one of Ted Chan's lab rats, like that pig they dragged out of here first?"
"Don't you dare put me in the same sentence as that brainless meathead. Those losers offered themselves up as lab rats. Me? I'm one of his few regulars."
Wolf casually smashed his fists together. Metal shrieked against metal, and a nasty little smile crept across his face.
"I've heard about you a couple times. Fresh Orange who just started working the bottom floors, yeah? Got lucky and pulled a few decent scores out of the Dark Zone."
"If you're jealous, just say so. I'll even throw in an autograph later."
"Kid's putting on airs."
Wolf brushed off the jab like it was nothing and flicked a look toward the organizers. A bell clanged in answer. The air went heavy all at once, and I twisted my upper body aside on pure instinct.
A blast punched past my torso by a hair. Call it a compressed-air cannon if that makes it easier—something like a Pneumatic Grenade had fired from a small aperture that opened in his palm. It was tiny, which meant it had been packed to an absurd pressure, and the irony was that it dealt no area damage at all.
If that thing had actually hit me, though, I'd be looking at the equivalent of a gunshot wound.
Leave it to a guy running combat implants to fight dirty and weird.
"Not bad eyes. Not bad reflexes, either. Hard to believe that body's actually running stock."
"What, you get off staring into people's guts with those creepy peepers?"
"Relax. I don't have a hobby of peeking at some guy's insides!"
A short burst of propulsion, and Wolf's body vanished. He was in my face before I could blink. He was so fast that even my excellent dynamic vision lost him for a fraction of a second.
The Purist tech tree really is garbage.
You need to chrome yourself out head to toe and mainline boosters like candy before it actually starts to feel like a game.
"Think you've got time to zone out?!"
Instead of answering, I twisted acrobatically and slipped the fist driving in like a piledriver. Unlike Flesh's attacks, though, this wasn't some half-baked swing padded with artificial muscle. This was a genuine combat implant, and taking no damage at all was never on the table. Even a graze shredded the skin and set every nerve ending screaming.
NPCs slathered in this much hardware were supposed to be high-difficulty named mobs that only showed up in the final stretch of a minigame. Apparently the organizers would rather die than let me win.
Not even a registered fighter. They grabbed a prisoner mercenary who was already making a living just fine in the Dark Zone and threw him in at the last second.
Which meant I'd become that much of a threat to their little "show." Fixed scripts were a given at a fight club like this, and I'd been running up the win streak a little too mercilessly.
Not that I'm planning to quit.
This wasn't just any prize. These were Prototype Liquid Nanobots. They lagged well behind the genuine article the megacorps sold, but they were still something an ordinary person couldn't even dream of touching. If you could get your hands on that without spending a single credit, anyone—not just me—would put their life on the line for it.
Wolf was hammering me with a frantic barrage, and he was almost certainly here for the same reason. The organizers would let him take the five-win streak, hand over the prize, then quietly approach him afterward and buy it back. An ugly little racket without a shred of the romance a man's blood and sweat were supposed to buy. I was the only upstanding model citizen in this entire prison, and I wasn't about to stand there and watch that happen.
At the tail end of the incoming flurry, I read the pattern without much trouble and snatched his fist out of the air. My body was purely human, though, so I had no intention of forcing a contest of strength—no twisting, no crushing. Quite the opposite.
"Hup!"
The way judo or ssireum steals an opponent's power for a sudden, one-shot finish, I caught his wrist before he could pull the punch back and drove it up over my shoulder. He wasn't an idiot, of course. Nobody just eats a move that obvious.
I wasn't planning to cheese it with an obvious move in the first place.
I sold the throw—kept the motion going as if I were going to haul him over my shoulder and spike him into the floor—then went slack in an instant and drove a kick straight in. Wolf, who had planted both legs to keep from being dragged, felt the force holding him vanish all at once and took the kick clean in the gut.
"Hack! Hah. Not bad."
The three most dangerous weapons on the human body are the elbow, the knee, and the heel. All three let you concentrate force through hard, angular bone, and the destruction that detonates at the end of the strike is considerable. No matter how densely an opponent wraps their abdomen in muscle, no matter how much hardware they slather on, they cannot stop a sudden shock from rattling everything inside. If they could, they wouldn't be human anymore. They'd be a machine.
"Moves like that, I'm starting to wonder if you really don't have any implants. You know how to fight, too. What were you doing on the outside before they locked you up?"
"Beats me. Probably a job that involved rounding up guys like you and beating the hell out of them."
"Don't give me that shit!"
This time he came in determined not to get careless, guard hiked so high it almost made the implants look pointless, crashing forward in a tight in-fighting stance. The pressure and the footwork were the real thing—a refined brawler's—so I didn't meet him in the pocket. I answered with out-fighting instead. I had nothing on him in burst leap, stamina, or even reach. But he had to close the distance himself if he wanted to hit me, and that made him manageable.
He's going for the Pneumatic Grenade again.
I slipped a few feinted punches and caught the prosthetic implant vibrating, just barely. My flesh was still about as untouched as any Purist's, but when it came to implants I had knowledge and experience to rival Ted Chan himself. I'd spent ten years in EFD using every implant they ever patched in, and I'd written the guides and the reviews to prove it.
I'll say this with a decade on the line: implants are not omnipotent.
Unlike a body of meat and bone, implants are far too obvious.
When the aperture in a prosthetic palm starts clicking like it's about to bloom open, and the implant shudders from packing air to the limit for a Pneumatic Grenade, a crusty veteran like me clocks it on sight.
"Eat this!"
Wolf threw a punch as cover and fired the Pneumatic Grenade point-blank, a smile of certain victory already on his face.
Problem is, I've already seen that smile five times tonight, and it's starting to get old.
I stepped straight into the palm that had finished spooling up to fire. Then I grabbed the prosthetic fingers—spread wide like a flower in full bloom—with both hands and wrenched them backward.
The single greatest weakness of an implant: because it stands in for a body part, it's built from staggeringly fine, sensitive components. Knock the "in-between" even slightly out of sequence, and the whole thing malfunctions.
Say, for instance, the fingers get bent so far back that the muzzle meant to launch the Pneumatic Grenade never opens properly—and the implant detonates from the inside.
"GRAAAAAAAAH!"
The malfunction sets off the compressed tank inside the implant. The explosion shorts the artificial circuits wired into the neural net. The short lands a direct hit on the brain, the final station of the entire nervous system. You know. The usual side effects.
"This is why newbies shouldn't just slap implants on without thinking."
That's how you pick up bad habits.